Former Truth and Reconciliation Commission chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu will meet his ex-commissioners on Thursday to see whether an amicable solution can be found to the threatened court action by the Inkatha Freedom Party, the justice ministry said on Wednesday.
The IFP wants to stop publication of the TRC’s final report, scheduled for September, in a bid to protect its leader’s reputation.
Justice Ministry representative Paul Setsetse said Thursday’s court case would not go ahead as planned, because the government had yet to file an answering affidavit.
Moreover, Tutu wanted to discuss with the commissioners themselves ”to see how far they can go to settle the matter amicably”.
Setsetse said he believed that if the court case went ahead this would take place next week, as ”we’ll be ready with our papers”.
Meanwhile, IFP leader and Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s legal adviser Dr Mario Ambrosini, told Sapa the IFP would not go ahead with the case on Thursday as it had received an ”undertaking from the TRC that they are stopping finalisation of the report”.
”We are negotiating the actual language,” he said.
However, Setsetse said there was no agreement as claimed by Ambrosini.
Adding to the confusion the IFP issued a statement through its representative Velaphi Ndlovu saying the legal proceedings would take place in the Cape High Court on Thursday.
”These proceedings flow from the long-standing litigation between IFP President, Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and the IFP on the one hand, and the TRC on the other.
”For years Minister Buthelezi and the IFP have sought to set aside preposterous, outlandish and surreal findings which the TRC made against them.
”For years, the TRC has been unable or unwilling to produce a single shred of evidence, which could support the findings it made, and which could justify why they ought not be set aside.”
It was against this background that Buthelezi and the IFP had filed papers for an interdict to prevent the finalisation of the TRC report pending the resolution of the underlying litigation, Ndlovu said.
”The litigation has dragged on this long because of the TRC’s unwillingness to co-operate, to the point that after numerous requests it had to be ordered by the court to produce documents recording the reasons for its findings.
”The TRC failed to comply with such order and is technically in contempt of Court.”
The interdict that the IFP was seeking was necessary to avoid the report being finalised in such a manner that ”the old preposterous and outlandish findings, which the TRC can neither justify nor corroborate, remain part of it”, Ndlovu said.
The finalisation of the report would give additional credence to such findings, and would compound the already irreparable damages wrongfully inflicted on Buthelezi and the IFP.
”The IFP seeks resolution of this matter as soon as possible and, for this reason, together with the interdict, is seeking to bring forward the hearing on the merits of the underlying litigation.”
Contacted about Ambrosini’s comments, Ndlovu was not in an immediate position to clarify the apparent contradiction, but later said the IFP stood by its statement.
Ambrosini was not immediately available for comment.
— In its interim report, the TRC found that the IFP, under party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, was the ”primary non-state perpetrator… responsible for approximately 33% of all the violations reported to the commission”. – Sapa